From Laundry Boy To Professor Emeritus

First Draft: 10th April 2013;  Last Revised: 6th May 2013.

Since I started with little knowledge of my mother’s early life it initially felt like I was learning a great deal as I discovered the basic facts summarized in my second letter. But it did not take long before I began to realize the limitations on what I was finding and the very partial extent to which I was likely to ever be able to uncover the stories I was hoping to be able to recreate and record. At the same time my imagination was catching fire about what her life had been like. It raced between scenarios dark and troubling to the opposite extremes of brightness and elation.

Through The Prism Darkly

My more pessimistic reflections feed on bits and pieces of information and shadowy impressions that generate troubling questions. Living where she did in the Lambeth area of London during the turbulent times of her youth does not suggest comfortable, secure and stable circumstances. Poverty, sickness and violence would likely have been all too present in the community. The tragedy of WWI, the unemployment of the interwar years and the turbulent politics around the accompanying social unrest throughout Britain would have been omnipresent in daily life. Born into a home still grieving the loss of a first son, dead after only 6 short months of his life, where the first years of her own life were shaken by a father going into the army with the outbreak of war and in the midst of this a younger brother arriving to add to the demands on a mother’s love, time and energy, would be a precarious start in life, at best. Losing her mother to lung cancer just as the difficult times of adolescence were beginning tends to suggest the early years of her life were indeed hard. Whatever her schooling, finding a job and holding it amidst the bankruptcy and unemployment that was rampant during the first years of her working life would have been a challenge. At the same time, having no mother in the home, she would have felt responsibilities for keeping it going while looking out for a younger brother still in school. On top of all this, her father bringing a new stepmother into their lives and moving the family into her home would have been disruptive and possibly much worse.

My mother’s and my uncle’s silence about their past is disturbing in itself and fertile soil for dreadful thoughts seeded by fragments of remembered conversations and events. The grateful mention by my Uncle Wally about how he and my mother were able to live with Aunt Lucy and little bits of other comments suggest that my Mum and her brother did not live with their mother and father for at least part of their childhood.

Some of the things that I observed directly during over half a century with Mum have reinforced half-formed concerns. For example, she enjoyed an occasional drink, seldom having more than a glass of Babycham, but she had an unreasoningly acute fear of such innocent habits escalating into drunkenness and the unpleasant behaviour, even violence, that might result. Another example: My mother could be a warm, extraordinarily generous and thoughtful friend to some people, yet on other occasions appear shockingly threatened by those who offered her friendship. And another: Mum was unselfconscious around my Dad and I, even when accidentally found naked in the bath or bedroom, but recoil with totally inexplicable horror if some man, with whom she had appeared to get on well in recent hours, said goodbye with a friendly kiss or light embrace. The series of nervous breakdowns that resulted in her hospitalization several times during my school years had no obvious cause that was apparent to me at the time. It is only in recent years, sadly too late to talk with her about what may have been demons in her life, that I have begun to sense a possibly dark story of her childhood that might make more coherent sense of the fragments of ill-formed, troubling impressions.

 

 

Through The Prism Brightly

And yet, if my reflections start instead by looking back on all my varied experiences with her, the other mother I knew over the years, not just the tragic one imagined out of recently obtained facts about her childhood, and partial ones at that, there is an alternative, optimistic story line that could well be created.

The mother I knew was loving, intelligent and courageous. These qualities could not have sprung out of nothing just when I was born; they had to have been nourished during her own childhood.

The loving and thoughtful care and consideration I received from her throughout my early life and until her dying day could not only have been spawned in the deep affection and love that she had found in courting, marrying and living with my Dad. At no time in my life have I had any reason to doubt the extraordinary love that they showed again and again for each other. Whatever her experiences during her childhood, she had to have experienced the warmth and security of being loved by at least one person – parent, relation or friend, who gave her the love she needed to become the mother she was to me and with which she embraced her daughter-in-law, Plu, and her only grandchild, Zosia. Everything I know of her brother, my Uncle Wally, including his deep affection for her and the parent that he was,  confirms for me that this belief is well founded.

Mum’s intelligence was not just a fortunate gift from nature but also clearly the result of hard work and a continuing desire to learn and progress. Whatever the constraints on her educational opportunities, she made the most of them. Her letter writing, tutoring of me, competency as manageress of a fast modernizing laundry and dry-cleaning business, continuing interest in learning new skills and delight in reading widely for career and leisure, are just some of the dimensions of her intelligence.

One of the more specific and ultimately significant indicators of her capabilities is that somewhere in the 1930s she must have demonstrated the skills and potential to be admitted to the training program of the prestigious Savoy Hotel Laundry. The qualifications and references obtained from the Savoy, which Dad also obtained, must have been key in securing the positions as Manager and Manageress of the Cambridge Steam Laundry. Along the way, my mother and father, had to have worked on developing speaking skills and accents that gained them not only admission to the apprenticeship program at the Savoy but also the managerial jobs in Cambridge, where their customers would be in large part the demanding Colleges and members of the University. In the hyper class conscious society that predominated in England in those days, Mum and Dad would have been judged unacceptable the moment they opened their mouths at the job interviews if they had spoken with the accents and language  acquired as young children that would have revealed immediately the poorer areas of London from which they came.

I witnessed my mother’s courage across the years we shared after her youth, as she met the challenges of a laundry industry that boomed and crashed during the brief quarter century of her career; my being a slow developer in an education system that did not have any patience for such misfits; successive nervous breakdowns and hospitalizations of her husband and herself; financial straits resulting from paying school fees and later the loss of house, car and other perks with the sudden end of the managers jobs; Dad’s suicide without warning that came on top of the loss of both their jobs and home; a son and his family making their life half-a-world away; and her second husband, Ralph’s, sudden death after twenty years together, leaving her to spend her last few years in a residential home.

Some of her courage came from an inner faith in the caring support of a God, not necessarily the Roman Catholic one to whom she was required to convert before being allowed to marry my father, but one whom she believed would help her through the trials that life brought upon her.  But first and foremost it came from a set of humane and principled values that shaped and guided a remarkable inner strength and fortitude, and upon occasion, bloody minded stubbornness, all of which were vital outcomes of her upbringing. Along the way, in addition to her two husbands, a small number of relatives and friends were there at critical times to support and encourage the rather independent-minded lady that was my mother, including: Wally, Grace, Maureen, Ivy, Violet, Winnie, Mrs. Jones, Tina and Tim. These are stories to be told later.

Using The Prisms

Neither one of the prisms can alone reveal the true story. At any one moment or event in my mother’s life one may be more relevant than the other. In all likelihood there are occasions on which some mix of the two is revealing of the inherent contradictions. Going forward from here I hope to refine the components and structures of the prisms as they are tested in application to what more I discover. Eventually they will hopefully assist in shining a more revealing light on all that is to be understood about not only my mother but others,  including my father, relatives and close friends and as appropriately revised to fit their circumstances.

As part of these explorations I have in mind learning more about the well-known British novelist Catherine Cookson, whose many books totally engaged my mother. Many years ago, having caught the first episode of a TV dramatization of one of Cookson’s stories, I puzzled why my mother found such apparently bleak and grim stories so engrossing.   Recently, when I was beginning to imagine the conditions under which my mother might have grown up, I remembered Mum’s deep interest in Catherine Cookson’s stories and my reaction to them. This led me to look into Cookson’s writing and I soon learned how her own experiences growing up in South Shields, Tyneside had been the inspiration for much of her story telling, notably The Fifteen Streets reflected much of her early and difficult life. She was the daughter of an alcoholic mother, whom she believed to be her sister, and she was brought up by her grandparents. Leaving school at 13 she first worked in domestic service and then the laundry of a Workhouse. After a while she moved on to become the manager of the laundry at another Workhouse. Saving as much as she could she bought a house from which she could earn additional income by taking in lodgers. At the age of 34 she married a teacher at the local school but unfortunately became ill and had a nervous breakdown. It took her a decade to recover but in the process she found that writing was good therapy and it is from these traumatic beginnings that she eventually wrote almost a hundred books, before dying at the age of 91. Her many achievements as a writer and a philanthropist were recognized by creating her a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Her life (1906-1997) spans the same times as my mother’s and, from the little I know, was lived in circumstances, the likes of which Mum certainly saw upon occasion and may have experienced directly in some aspects. Working in a laundry, suffering a nervous breakdown and finding solace in writing were experiences my mother shared with her in some degree. Substantial achievements despite challenging beginnings and tragic events in life ultimately revealed the courage of each.  I now understand better why Mum might have been drawn so strongly to Catherine Cookson’s stories and I want to read some of them to see what insight they might give me when viewed through the prisms I have created.

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